The fashion designer who famously turned a table into a dress is trying
something perhaps even stranger: creating his own contemporary-dance show. Anita
Singh finds out what's in store

The last timeHussein Chalayan put on a show at Sadler’s Wells, he dressed a woman in a coffee table.

The year was 2000, and the designer had chosen the London venue to unveil his autumn/winter collection. A set of furniture was laid out at the front of the stage. At the end of the show, one of the models stepped into the centre of the table and transformed it into a dress – cue wild applause, and a place in the history books as the creator of one of the decade’s most famous designs. It was a moment that cemented Chalayan’s reputation as an innovator whose work blurs the boundaries between fashion, performance and art.

Fifteen years later, and Chalayan is back at Sadler’s Wells to spring another surprise. Despite having no formal background in contemporary dance, he has been invited to create his first dance production, Gravity Fatigue.

Chalayan is the artistic director, conveying his ideas through sketches, “mood boards” and other media to his 13 dancers and the show’s choreographer, Damien Jalet. He has also, of course, designed the costumes, and they will be integral to the performance – either restricting or enhancing the dancers’ movements to fit the requirements of the scene.

“Normally in this world, the choreographer is king,” says Alistair Spalding, Sadler’s Wells artistic director. “They come up with the ideas and lead a project, then ask someone like Hussein to come and collaborate. “This is an experiment, and that’s what I like about it: it turns the tables a little bit and throws up a different way of thinking.”

The production will be as minimal as Chalayan’s fashion shows. “I don’t want this to be too dancey – too choreographed and busy. I find it much more powerful to be simple. I guess I almost like it to not look like dance at all, more movement and gesture,” he explains.

“It’s a bit like my clothes, really. I often think that the subtlety is in the way you might eliminate a seam or have a garment that’s one piece. I guess I’m interested in things that appear to be impossible at first but somehow they are possible to create. I’m interested in the impossible, generally speaking. I think that informs almost every aspect of my life.”

The show will explore identity, displacement and invisibility. They are themes the designer has returned to again and again in his work, drawing on his family background: born to a Turkish-Cypriot family in divided Nicosia, he came to London as a child, with his father, while his mother remained behind.

His work has always been at the avant garde end of the spectrum. Not for him a Versace parade of supermodels down a catwalk. Like his contemporary, the late Alexander McQueen (they graduated from Central St Martin’s a year apart), his shows have an element of theatre. For his graduate collection in 1993, he famously buried the clothes in a back yard then dug them up; then there was the air mail dress, made out of paper and designed to be folded up and posted.

“People always have to pigeonhole you,” says the 44-year-old. “They can’t imagine that a person can have more than one career. I am an artist and a designer, if you want to categorise me, but ultimately I’m interested in ideas.”

“Take my air mail dress: it’s an art piece, it’s a wearable piece, it’s an idea, it’s everything. What I really like about the dance world is that ideas do merge. Design, movement – it’s almost like art in action.

“Essentially,” he continues, “I see myself as a storyteller. What’s really nice about a project like this is that fashion can be limited in terms of storytelling, but when you introduce movement and combine it with clothes all the elements come together. There are some ideas that I’ve had for years and haven’t been able to realise, so this is a fantastic platform for me.”

It is Jalet’s and Spalding’s job to mould this vision into a commercial production – “to give it a beginning, a middle and an end”, as Spalding puts it. He adds: “All this sounds quite conceptual, but what happens on stage is that those concepts are represented physically and visually through the choreography. Take that idea of the invisible: people will be appearing to move in a way you don’t quite understand. There’s a little bit of, 'What’s going on here?’ ”

Chalayan says the project wouldn’t have got off the ground without Spalding, “because a lot of people in the arts are quite conventional. They don’t consider designers to be part of the art world. Had it not been for Alistair’s broader vision, I don’t think this would happen.”

For his part, Spalding – whose 15 years at Sadler’s have marked an exceptionally creative period in its history – says no other designer could pull this off. “If I may return the compliment,” he says with a laugh, “there aren’t so many people like Hussein either. This is a very particular person here, so that’s why the offer was made.”

Gravity Fatigue runs from Oct 28-31. Tickets for the autumn/winter season are on sale from May 11: 0844 412 4300; sadlerswells.com